Root for a Change

Teaching root awareness to Hebrew L1 young children with interactive videos

Abstract

The Semitic root forms an integral part of Hebrew language instruction, and though formally taught from second grade on, its extraction seems to be an obstacle for most students. We used our unique online root awareness instruction program in order to teach young children to extract the roots of different Hebrew words, as well as pseudowords, and to detect their weak spots in the process. In this paper, we present the effects of our program, as demonstrated by a significant improvement in the children's root extraction skills. We further provide an analysis of the children's responses, based on which we specify the factors that best predict failure in root extraction. These factors may lead to new insights regarding Hebrew language instruction as well as other Semitic languages.